On 23 May, the Nehruvian era saw its sunset and yielded the horizon to the sunrise of a Modivian epoch. There were few socialists left but the failure of Communists to get elected marked the cremation of all shades of socialism. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the ideology might not have survived.

The fact that Communists did manage to get elected was a tribute to the strength of the Red party organizations. Secularism was a bogey promoted to prevent a nationalist movement from rising. Uncannily, neither socialism nor secularism was written in the Preamble of the 1950 Constitution. They were both smuggled into the document during the Emergency.

Pluralism was another balloon floated to protect family-owned parties against competition that might grow out of the soil of India. India, after Partition, did not need a pluralistic polity. Yes, there was a substantial Islamic presence but it was meant to end with the creation of Pakistan or the New Medina. For the rest, India has a single thread binding its ethos.

That is the faith in karma and its fruit or bhagya. Aldous Huxley called his book The Perenial Philosophy possibly because karma is as scientific as physics. That every action has a reaction equal and opposite, which explains why India has not disintegrated, whereas Islam could not hold Pakistan together beyond 24 years. There are other religions in India and they have a right to flourish but a State cannot be structured to suit every minority.

This writer has come across many Indian Christians who do not reject the role of karma in life; one reason why they spontaneously mingle with the mainstream politics and never betray symptoms of separatism. To divert attention and perpetuate dynastic rule, slogans, if not also bubbles, were necessary. Indians cannot digest socialism because it pretends to stand for equality, which militates against liberty and which is a corollary of karma.

Every individual’s actions are different; nor can one put a lid on virtuous karma of anyone. Excellent deeds should yield excellent destiny, which would make equality an illusion. Similarly, the Hindu ethos is replete with so much tolerance that makes secularism redundant. There is no element of politics in Hindu scriptures and India has accepted almost everyone who has come to settle here.

This is a compliment which every Jew, this writer has met, has paid the Hindu ethos. Hinduism itself is so full of plurality and variety that pluralism is also redundant. Nehruvianism by the confession of Jawaharlal himself, could not have been native to the Indian soil. He himself is reported to have proudly stated: I am a Muslim by culture, an Englishman by upbringing and a Hindu by accident.

The preceding paragraphs have illustrated how alien and contrived Nehruvianism was. This explains two things. One, it explains the slowness of India’s development; the situation was rather like making Indians function with their right hand thrust into a left hand glove. Two, inevitably, there was a wide gulf between Nehru’s India and the real Bharat; little wonder that Narendra Modi has been looked upon as a parvenu in New Delhi.

He therefore needed to be elected a second time with an increased majority for India to accept him as its ongoing ruler. This is not the place to criticize Nehru for his Muslim bias even after Partition, which had taken its toll of India’s importance. But it is relevant to ask what India was. To illustrate this point, it would be useful to quote the experience of this writer’s father in the USA, whose citizens identified our country as Hindu.

For them, at least in the 1930s, Indians were whom we call Red Indians. An Indian Muslim was to an American a Hindu Muslim, a Hindu Christian, a Hindu Parsi and so on. This impression was very much alive till as late as the 1980s, when then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited America. Therefore, the exclusion by Nehruvian India of the word Hindu was unfortunate.

The Nehruvians ignored the fact that almost all Indian Muslims call the country Hindustan, neither India nor Bharat. This could seem to be a matter of nomenclature. However, if we were to compare the India’s stature in the world, when Dr. Manmohan Singh was Prime Minister and what Narendra Modi was able to achieve in a matter of three to four years, this becomes stark. Modi became Prime Minister in 2014 and the following year, was invited to address the British parliament as well as for an exclusive lunch by Her Majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

No Indian leader has been bestowed either of these honours. Jawaharlal Nehru was put on an unduly high pedestal, and nearly all the policies he followed were treated as an ideology. The Congress party wanted to play down the 1962 disaster at the hands of the Chinese.

Indira Gandhi who succeeded Nehru soon enough, would be keen to give her father as much importance as possible. Thereafter, whether democracy, socialism or secularism, each was twisted to suit the Prime Minister at any given time. Indira Gandhi included an Emergency as a part of democracy. Nationalization of banks and the coal mines were treated as socialism, although the takeover was an act of state capitalism.

Minority appeasement was made into an arm of secularism. These ideological distortions, in any case distorted policy, which in turn prevented India from coming into its own and progressing at its potential pace. Even as late as 1978 or 1980, the Chinese and Indian economies were at comparable levels. It must be noted here that China was also held down by ideological compunctions.

Mao Zedong was succeeded by Deng Xiaoping, who was a pragmatist par excellence. He famously said: “It does not matter what the colour of a cat is, so long as it catches mice”. Thereafter, his country’s economy really took off and rocketed to become the world’s second largest economy after the USA.

Meanwhile, India was paying the price of Nehruviavism and continued to pay dearly until the advent of P.V. Narasimha Rao as Prime Minister in 1991. Supreme power had fallen into his lap like a lottery. Yet, midway through his term, he slowed down on his reforms and virtually halted the country’s economic progress.

Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 with good intentions of releasing the country’s potential toward progress and prosperity. Little had he realized that most nationalized banks had their coffers empty. They had lent out money recklessly during Dr. Manmohan Singh’s ten years as prime minister. Most of the money was not intended to be repaid by the unscrupulous borrowers.

A great deal of the Modi government’s energy was wasted curing this malaise of non-performing assets, rather than investing in due development. Nevertheless, two historic steps were taken ~ the first was demonetization, which happened to frighten many an operator of the black economy. No modern economy can either function or prosper on parallel sledges, namely black money and white. This was followed by the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST).

This tax is now virtually the only indirect tax in India, except for items like liquor and petroleum. This has converted the entire Indian market into one, and unpartitioned, unlike the days of state sales tax. It has gone a long way in preventing the generation of black money. These were not popular measures with the beneficiaries of black money and therefore required an exceptionally bold and strong leader to enforce them.

They will stand the Indian economy in good stead for progress and prosperity indefinitely. The area in which there is likely to be a sharp contrast between the old and the new ethos is foreign policy. Modivianism is unlikely to be passive, unlike in the past, when India was as if perpetually ready to retreat instead of resisting.

The cost of foreign policy is largely the expenditure on defence, which has been a neglected area, especially under Nehru himself until at least 1962. The Manmohan Singh period was equally barren. India’s image among the world’s leading powers has been a great achievement of the Modi government. The standoff at Doklam was a feather in India’s cap, whereas the airstrike on Balakot was a glorious moment in the context of counterterrorism.

(The writer is an author, thinker and a former Member of Parliament)